Brian Polian thought he had hit the big-time. As one of just 100-something FBS head coaches, why wouldn’t he? He was a 39-year-old who had been hired to lead Nevada, after the 2012 season. Mountain West Conference or not, this was rare air.

And yet at his alma mater, Polian would joke to his old John Carroll classmates, he was no better than the 13th-most successful person in his profession.

The self-deprecating Polian, now Notre Dame’s special teams coordinator, may have actually been giving himself too much credit. Heck, a whopping seven John Carroll alums have reached the heights of their profession this week alone, as members of a New England Patriots organization that is readying for its record 10th Super Bowl appearance Sunday.

The farm system to pro football’s greatest dynasty has its roots in a 3,000-student Jesuit college less than a half-hour East of Cleveland.

With the Patriots making their third Super Bowl appearance in the past four years and eighth since 2002, this week has become something of a near-annual celebration of sorts for John Carroll.

“I think on a deeper level it’s kind of an affirmation of, first of all, those guys when they were here and what they stood for and their work ethic and their abilities and to take their Jesuit education seriously,” John Carroll athletic director Laurie Massa told The Athletic.

“I think there’s a paradigm in Jesuit education that is experiential and involves reflection. I can’t help but think that that education they received here had an impact on how they moved forward because it’s not as much athletic ability as it is the people side of the job and the analytical side of the job and using their mind, body and spirit to make a difference.”

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For a school that plays in the Ohio Athletic Conference, the timing could not be better. Almost every Division I player will have picked his school by the Feb. 7 national signing day, meaning the dust will soon settle for the remaining crop of prepsters hungry to continue their gridiron pursuits at the next level.

For the overlooked grinders, what better way to both play collegiately and have access to a potential pipeline to the NFL — where 98 percent of college football-playing seniors will never end up in shoulder pads, anyway?

“I think it is an interesting sell because there’s not a lot of pro athletes coming out of here from a standpoint of football, but there’s a lot of people employed in high positions,” Massa said. “So it’s not the physicality part of it; it’s who they are as people and what they do with their education and how they developed work habits that make them successful. Those things are sold on a regular basis because we don’t sell the NFL playing deal. And so it’s such a great fit for us to talk about the decision-makers and those kinds of people.”

Nick Caserio (right) has been New England's player personnel director since 2008 and has been with the team since 2001. (Nick Cammett / Diamond Images / Getty Images)

Caserio was John Carroll’s quarterback, and as a result, he would regularly connect both on and off the field with McDaniels, who was a receiver. Both are among eight Patriots staffers whom former teammate John Priestap counts as clients in his job today as a financial adviser. Priestap, a former receiver, recalled Caserio and McDaniels displaying an uncanny wealth of knowledge that they were able to share with the entire receivers’ room.

“Not that they were designing gameplans, but they were thinking outside the box, creating an original thought, which I think helped a very — I can speak for myself — average athlete have a very good amount of success against, in a lot of cases, better athletes,” Priestap told The Athletic.

McDaniels, the son of a local prep coach, went on to become a graduate assistant for Nick Saban at Michigan State, where he met Brian Daboll, who would move on to New England a year later.

As he climbed the Patriots’ ladder, Daboll would recommend McDaniels for the openings left behind. McDaniels would then do the same for Caserio. The rest is Patriots — and NFL — history.

“Nick was just as he is today: He was like the most serious college student-athlete I’ve ever been around, to the point you kind of worried about him, like: Is this kid having any fun?” Greg Debeljak, a former John Carroll assistant and the current Case Western Reserve coach, told The Athletic. “It was all business. He’d come in early in the morning before classes to watch film, he’d stop by the offices between classes, eat his lunch in our offices, he’d stay late afterwards. You could see that and you knew that his work ethic was just unbelievable.

“And Josh, with his father being in such a high-pressure high school job for 20 years, you saw that background in him too, that he was raised in a football family and a lot of things rubbed off. Not only knowledge of the game, but pressure situations.”

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The group that will be going for a sixth Lombardi Trophy this weekend actually makes up just one branch of the modern-day John Carroll NFL tree. The other stems from the Polian family: in addition to Brian (’97), brother Chris (’93) is the Jaguars’ pro personnel director. The two overlapped in college with renowned Ravens assistant Greg Roman (’95), along with Tom Telesco (’95) and Dave Caldwell (’96), the current general managers of the Chargers and Jaguars, respectively.

Unofficially at the head of it all is the godfather of sorts, legendary former Dolphins coach Don Shula (’51), whose era with the John Carroll helped pave the way near and far for figures like longtime college and pro assistant Chuck Preifer (’62), former Pro Bowl linebacker London Fletcher (’98) and current Chattanooga head coach Tom Arth (’03), who backed up Peyton Manning for three seasons with the Colts.

At least as it pertains to the Patriots’ group, most of those alums had different majors — McDaniels’ was in math, Caserio’s was finance, Caley’s was in communications, Ross’ was in marketing and Schuplinski returned to get his MBA. But they all ended up in the same field, and the school finally gave in to its storied gridiron history in 2014 by launching the Mike Cleary Program in Sports Studies, named after the late 1956 graduate who had served as the longtime executive director of the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics (NACDA).

Executive director of alumni relations and annual giving David Vitatoe, who played at John Carroll with four of the current Patriots staffers, looks at Bill Belichick’s palace like he would a New England branch of the university.

“They’re telling the John Carroll story to an audience we could never reach otherwise as this small Jesuit institution here in Cleveland,” Vitatoe said, “and that’s the story of graduating people who excel in leadership.”

Matt Fortuna covers national college football for The All-American. He previously covered Notre Dame and the ACC for ESPN.com and sits on the board of the Football Writers Association of America. Follow Matt on Twitter @Matt_Fortuna.